Setting up a Billing Alarm

Learn how to set up a billing alarm to warn us if our bill exceeds a certain threshold.

We'll cover the following

A handy alarm#

In this lesson, we’re going to create a billing alarm to get a notification when you are expected to reach or have reached a certain threshold. We will set a dollar value like five or ten dollars, and if we reach or are expected to reach that amount, we will get an email alert to let us know.

If you follow the instructions given in this course, you’ll be terminating your instances and the leasing objects — which might otherwise cost you money — to make sure that you stay within the free tier. You should also read up on what’s included in the free tier and make sure you’re aware of what you should do to make sure you don’t get any bills. But just in case, we’re going to set up the billing alarm.

You need to log in to the root account to do this because only the root account has access to modifying billing information.

Created with Fabric.js 3.6.3
Log in to the management console as the root account.

1 of 16

Created with Fabric.js 3.6.6
Go up here where we've got the name of our account and choose the down arrow. Then, we go to "My Billing Dashboard".

2 of 16

Created with Fabric.js 3.6.6
Then go down to "Billing preferences" and click it.

3 of 16

Created with Fabric.js 3.6.6
What you'll need to enable is "Receive Free Tier Usage Alerts" and "Receive Billing Alerts". You need to put in the email address that you want these to be sent to. You can then choose "Save preferences" and you will now receive free tier usage alerts to the email address that we specified.

4 of 16

Created with Fabric.js 3.6.6
We also want to receive billing alerts when we reach a certain threshold in a dollar value. So for that, choose "Manage Billing Alerts".

5 of 16

Created with Fabric.js 3.6.6
It opens up the monitoring tool called Cloudwatch and in Cloudwatch we go down to "Billing" which is under "Alarms".

6 of 16

Created with Fabric.js 3.6.6
We then choose "Create alarm".

7 of 16

Created with Fabric.js 3.6.6
It loads the metrics for us. The metric name is "EstimatedCharges" and the currency is US dollars. What we need to do now is to scroll down.

8 of 16

Created with Fabric.js 3.6.6
Specify the amount, in this case, I'm going to set mine to 10 dollars. You can then choose next.

9 of 16

Created with Fabric.js 3.6.6
Cloudwatch will create an SNS topic. SNS stands for the Simple Notification Service and is one of the AWS services that send messages to you. You can then choose "Create new topic".

10 of 16

Created with Fabric.js 3.6.6
Cloudwatch will create an SNS topic. SNS stands for the Simple Notification Service and is one of the AWS services that send messages to you. You can then choose "Create new topic".

11 of 16

Created with Fabric.js 3.6.6
We can then choose "BillingAlert" as the name and we can choose next.

12 of 16

Created with Fabric.js 3.6.6
We then get a summary of the information and we can just choose "Create alarm" and that's it.

13 of 16

Created with Fabric.js 3.6.6
We've now created our alarm but we get a message which tells us that we need to confirm the subscription in SNS. We can choose the option "View SNS Subscriptions" and it will take us over to the simple notification services console.

14 of 16

Created with Fabric.js 3.6.6
You can now see there's a pending confirmation here. You need to go to the email address that you used and you should find an email from Amazon. Choose to confirm subscription and you should then get a message saying subscription confirmed.

15 of 16

Created with Fabric.js 3.6.6
If we head back to the console and refresh this page we should now see that our subscription has been confirmed and that's it.

16 of 16

You can hit the RUN button below to open up a browser right here. This will make following along easier.

/
Readme.txt

That’s all we need to do. We’ll now get free tier usage alerts and also alerts that inform us when our account balance is going to exceed 10 dollars.

Modifying the Sign-in Link

Activate MFA on the Root Account